It’s Unaccounted For

TUESDAY PUZZLE — John D. Child makes his New York Times Crossword debut today and, as part of a collaboration with George Barany, he is demonstrating his good TASTE. All five of them.

Today’s Theme

Mr. Child and Dr. Barany offer us a set of theme entries that contain the five tastes that humans can distinguish. So, at 17A, the “trick football play,” STATUE OF LIBERTY, contains the word SALTY in the circled letters. The revealer, TASTE, is at 54D and is clued as “It’s often unaccounted for ... or a hint to this puzzle’s circled letters.”

I think it would have been fun if the theme entries had something to do with the TASTEs contained inside them. We have a random list of things who just happen to have the five tastes contained within. I did have fun trying to imagine the five TASTEs as descriptors for the theme entries: a SALTY (angry) STATUE OF LIBERTY, a SOUR (nasty) DESKTOP COMPUTER (we’ve all had those days when we lost our work to some odd computer glitch), a BITTER CABINET MINISTER, SLIPPERY WHEN WET (“SWEET!”) and UMAMI PURE MATHEMATICS (“What a meaty subject!”) Bonus points for including the lesser-known UMAMI taste, which is one of my favorites.

Tricky Clues

■ 5A: Misdirection alert! Your brain went to the music trio of Peter, Paul and Mary and couldn’t get unstuck, didn’t it? Me too. Today the answer to “Peter or Paul, but not Mary” is TSAR. Tricky!

■ 17A: Talk about misdirection: The STATUE OF LIBERTY trick football play — which I just learned about today — involves the quarterback faking a pass to one player while surreptitiously passing the ball to a running back passing behind him. And here I thought it had to do with standing very still while all the players on the opposing team mow you down. It just goes to show you, it pays to look things up.

■ 32A: Even though René Descartes was French, his ‘therefore” was ERGO because, as the father of modern Western philosophy, it was necessary for him to show the other philosophers that he was better philosopher than they were because he spoke Latin. It wasn’t easy riding herd on a horde of feral philosophers, so even though he wrote his 1637 “Discourse on the Method” in French, he dropped the mic, so to speak, by ending his treatise with the hoity-toity Latin “Cogito ERGO sum,” or “I think, therefore I am.” It would be a long time before anyone challenged him on that one.

■ 37D: A clever constructor’s trick: using a homograph (two or more words spelled the same but not necessarily pronounced the same and having different meanings and origins) to fool the solver. “Nice location” in today’s puzzle refers to the location of Nice, France, which is on the RIVIERA.

■ 48A: “You, abroad” is not a travel suggestion. It is asking you to come up with a three-letter word for “you” in another language. Today, the answer is the German SIE.

■ 26D: Watch your spelling! The clue is “Navel formation?”, so we’re looking for one form of a belly button, not a military “naval” formation. The answer today is OUTIE.

■ 61D: I laughed when I got this one. “Noah count?” looks weird on the page, but is a sound-alike for “No account.” The biblical Noah counted in pairs of animals, or TWO of each.

Constructors’s Notes

George Barany: John started working on this puzzle in April 2015, but got sidetracked by the earthquake in Nepal later that month. In early summer he sent a prototype to me to ask for help. I was sure that all five tastes could be incorporated into 15-letter theme answers, and he made a new grid. We worked through eight or nine versions of that and sent the puzzle to a few people to test solve in late summer 2015. With their feedback, we reworked the grid again and iterated fill changes through another half-dozen versions to what you see today. Submitted September 2015 and accepted in December of that year.

We were pleased to find a sweet spot for the revealer, TASTE, crossing two theme answers. It’s nice to see that our clues for SCENE and OUTIE are in the final version, and we especially enjoyed Will and Joel’s clue for PURE MATHEMATICS. Ours was [Goldbach’s conjecture, e.g.].

John Child: In October of 2014 I made a puzzle and asked for help on a crossword discussion blog for testers. I got a gratifying number of very helpful comments, including a long email from George packed with suggestions and information. George has been my mentor since then, and I owe the opportunity to appear in the Times today to him and his group of crossword friends.